The Road Back
The Road Back
Tom Danielson has had a tough year but is pretty sure things are on the road to getting better! He had surgery on his shoulder Tuesday in Durango, Colorado and was ready to head home from the hospital Wednesday night. Last week The Paceline caught up with Tom to talk about his injury in the Vuelta and his outlook for the future.
Cathy: Tom, share with us what happened with you; give us the full story. Inquiring minds want to know!
Tom: On the first day of the Vuelta two guys crashed in front of me going at really high speeds on a descent. (Damiano) Cunego was the guy who crashed directly in front of me as he and another guy went too fast around a bend and slid out. Cunego went one way and his bike went another and bounced off the ground. I avoided him but I didn’t know where his bike was going to go and unfortunately it went right down in front of me. I was able to pull up the front wheel of my bike to try to go over it but I guess something on his bike got caught in my front wheel and I flipped over and went straight onto my right shoulder. I didn’t get road rash because I just came down with a direct impact onto my shoulder.
I noticed that my shoulder wasn’t in the right location, that it was dislocated. I was sitting on the ground and knew I was basically okay and it could have been worse. I thought maybe I broke my collar bone at first, but really I couldn’t figure out why it looked that way, why my shoulder was so close to my neck. I went in the ambulance to the hospital in Vigo.
Cathy: They popped your should back in once you got to the hospital?
Tom: This is a pretty good story. I didn’t know if it was just popped out or broken or what. But I was put in the ambulance and no one spoke English and my Spanish was bad…but they didn’t attach me to the stretcher very well in the ambulance and the driver was driving crazy on these small roads. We went around a corner and I actually launched out of the bed with the neck brace on and everything! My instinct was to reach over and grab something and when I did that because I reached up over my head I popped my shoulder back in! So there I was on the floor of the ambulance, mad because I hadn’t been strapped in, but then I experienced some sort of euphoria when I realized the pain had gone away!
Cathy: Did you think at that point that perhaps that was all that was wrong?
Tom: Well I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe my collarbone was broken. At the hospital they did all of these x-rays and other things which was all kind of trippy, being in a foreign hospital like that where hardly any English was spoken. Eventually my team doctor came so that helped. It was awhile before I could understand what was going on.
And you were still in your Discovery kit at this point?
Oh yeah, oh yeah. They cut me out of it eventually.
So what was your real injury?
Basically they did a cat scan and it showed that my shoulder was broken, that the glenoid cavity (socket) had a piece broken off inside. They couldn’t really tell where the piece had broken, so that was when we knew I needed surgery and I flew back home to Durango (Colorado). So I immediately from high hopes in the Vuelta to just wanting my shoulder to be okay. I personally knew a very good orthopedic surgeon and I called him right away from the emergency room in Spain. The MRI showed it was a really big fracture, that half of my glenoid was fractured AND a piece was broken off.
Surgery is (was) Tuesday?
Yeah it was supposed to be last week but the wound from the impact of the fall is right close to where they will make the incision so we’ve waited for that to heal. They don’t want to risk any bacteria being around that area. I’ll have surgery early in the morning and stay overnight, then I should get to go home the next day. Then after 2 or 3 weeks I think I can start rehabbing it, but I can exercise with it as soon as I feel like it. I can do all of this in Durango. There are some great doctors here.
You’ve had a hell of a year, Tom.
Yeah, it’s been positive and it’s been negative. On the positive side I feel I’ve solved some problems I’ve been dealing with for a long time. It took a long time to solve my stomach problems and that was brutal. People tell me now they feel bad for me with my broken shoulder but believe me the stomach problem was worse than this. This is so much more defined. It’s a broken shoulder and is visible, so it makes more sense to me.
When I was going back in the ambulance I was disappointed that my season was over. I had tried to be quiet about my hopes for the Vuelta but I was feeling really, really good and I felt so fresh and so strong. At the same time this entire year sucked and it was a bit of a relief to just not have to deal with it any more.
To be brutally honest the one weak point in my career has been my head and it always has been. When my head is really good I’m strong but when it’s not so good I am worthless. You can see that in my performances. Overcoming all of these challenges since the Vuelta last year has put things into perspective for me. I have a better idea of who I am and what I’m doing and how I can overcome things for myself in the future. This happens to everyone and it was just my turn. So I have learned to put things in perspective, to put my career in focus. It’s made me a lot stronger in my head and I needed that. I needed a good knock-down so I could learn to pick myself back up.
Now let’s talk about the future for you. You’ve already announced that you are going to Team Slipstream, so you are one of the lucky ones who have already signed with a team. What attracted you to Slipstream?
For me the first and foremost thing was that it is a growing team and a building team. And it’s an American team so I like that and I like the riders on it. I look at my career and I see where I’ve been and where I need to go and realize I need to take some chances to try to get some big results. I need to push it to see where I can go and here’s a team that is doing the exact same thing. They want to be at the top of cycling and they’re based out of Colorado, too! They look a lot like Discovery Channel to me in a younger stage. They have a good budget, good ethics, and good motivation. They want to develop their riders, especially the young ones, to be sure they are well trained and are given opportunities. And the team is getting results now. You always saw them in the peloton and you knew they were good, they were always in the right place, they just weren’t getting the wins quite yet. But now they are being pushed a little more and given better tools to get the results.
I feel I am in a quite similar position. I feel like I’m there but something is still missing and I need to reinvent myself in some ways. I need to take some risks and push my training to another level. I want to finish races better, to not have a bad day, to improve my time trialing, things like that. I need to be the whole package. My mental side of things is improved after going through the things I did this year. So I am excited about the opportunities ahead of me. Plus the team is sponsored by a burrito company so I am looking forward to burritos in the mussettes!
